Software-Defined Everything Begins With The Network

Last week, Las Vegas proved to be the center of gravity for the technology industry, as the EMC World and Interop conferences bookended an extended discussion of disruption, innovation, and digital transformation.

In addition to the industry-shaking merger of Dell and EMC, perhaps the broadest disruptions are in the network itself, as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) proves to be a turbulent force of change for data centers, cloud computing, and digital business in general.

Given the dearth of innovation at the last Interop conference I attended, SDN has breathed new life into the innovations both at Interop and on the exhibit floor at
EMC World. Here are the hot spots.

Aryaka

As I explained in my recent article on Riverbed’s new SteelConnect Software-Defined Wide-Area Network (SD-WAN) solution, the market for SD-WAN products is set to explode.

Aryaka, however, is taking a large step beyond SD-WAN with its global private network. Aryaka contracts with numerous carriers around the world to build what is essentially an alternate Internet – one that Aryaka can control, manage, and provision in a fully software-defined manner.

This network connects points of presence (POPs) scattered around the world. Aryaka customers can VPN into their local POP, or if they want to avoid any possible last-mile bottleneck, they can get an appliance that brings an Aryaka endpoint onto their internal network.

CloudGenix

CloudGenix also offers an SD-WAN, virtualizing heterogeneous transport technologies into a unified WAN, but its core innovation is to build out their infrastructure following
Google’s example: horizontally scalable yet centrally controlled.

CloudGenix thus brings horizontal scalability to the SD-WAN marketplace, making the software-defined part of the SD-WAN value proposition similar to the cloud. It also offers zero-touch provisioning of SD-WAN endpoints, and enables customers to quickly deploy SaaS apps while securing customers’ virtual networks.

Fiber Mountain

Since I had already highlighted Fiber Mountain in my 2014 article on Interop, I told Fiber Mountain CEO M. H. Raza that I would only mention it in this article if it was bringing an entirely new disruption to market.

Traditionally, connecting your gear in a colo facility to a new carrier can take days or weeks, as someone has to physically install the appropriate cabling and other necessary technology. CrossCage Plus reduces that provisioning time to seconds.

Furthermore, the same technology facilitates software-driven connections between cages in each facility – either belonging to the same company, or from one company’s cage to another’s. Fiber Mountain envisions that this capability will create a marketplace for excess colo capacity, as subletting such capacity to another company will be as simple as clicking a mouse in a web portal.

Primary Data

Primary Data offers data and storage virtualization, so it isn’t in the SDN market – but its technology shows the power that SDN can deliver to data center architectures.

Primary Data’s technology abstracts heterogeneous storage technologies, allowing customers to treat a mix of different types of storage as a single virtual volume.

With Primary Data’s platform, applications, servers, and clients can transparently access data, regardless of whether they are located in direct-attached or network-attached storage, in on-premises data centers, private clouds, or even in public clouds.

Because its platform is storage agnostic, Primary Data can automatically place data on the right resources across file, block, and object storage to meet evolving application requirements in real time – and furthermore, the platform can move data from one location to another while applications that are accessing those data are up and running.

Riverbed

Riverbed Technologies chose EMC World to demonstrate its SteelFusion ‘hyper-converged edge’ platform. With SteelFusion, branches or other remote locations behave like smartphones that maintain their data in the cloud: they are automatically synchronized with the cloud, and in the case of loss, it’s simple to provision a replacement.

SteelFusion maintains branch data centrally to lighten the load on the edge systems that branches must support. The product also provides centralized backup, data governance, and security. Perhaps the most disruptive feature of SteelFusion, however, is how it handles business continuity.

Because SteelFusion transparently migrates branch data to a central data center while maintaining recent and frequently used data on-site, if a disaster befalls the branch then no data are lost.

But even if the data center itself experiences an outage, the branches can continue to operate, as all new data (for example, recent point-of-sale transactions) are maintained locally. Once the data center is back online, SteelFusion seamlessly synchronizes locally stored data with a central repository.

On the Way to Software-Defined Everything

The five vendors featured in this article share a common innovation: the increasing use of software-defined infrastructure. Beginning with the physical network, the ability to control the provisioning, management, and integration of technology infrastructure purely via software is rapidly maturing.

Cloud computing, of course, is essentially software-driven – and the success of the cloud has proven the viability of the approach. We now have software-driven storage, servers, application integration, and more. The writing is on the wall: it won’t be long till we reach the Software-Driven Everything vision of fully software-controlled infrastructure.

Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Fiber Mountain and Riverbed are Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. EMC covered Jason Bloomberg’s expenses at EMC World, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Interop Las Vegas 2016.

Jason Bloomberg is a leading IT industry analyst, Forbes contributor, keynote speaker, and globally recognized expert on multiple disruptive trends in enterprise technology and digital transformation.
He is founder and president of Agile Digital Transformation analy...